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WD® Customers Around the Globe Recognize Company as Storage Vendor of the Year

Irvine, CA - 5 maart 2014

Hundreds of distributors, retailers and e-tailers across the U.S. and Europe-Middle East-Africa regions have selected WD, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company, as the best hard drive company with which to partner during the past year.

In the U.S., CRN’s 2014 Channel Champion Survey gathered more than 6000 solutions provider responses. The Channel Company presented WD the Channel Champion award for the SATA hard drives category at a ceremony on March 4. In the EMEA region, channel businesses selected WD as The Storage Vendor of the Year, and the award was recently presented to the company at the EMEA Channel Academy: 2014 Awards in association with the DISTREE EMEA event.

The Channel Company qualifies solutions providers and conducts extensive surveys, during which vendors are rated on 12 criteria under three sub-categories: Technical Satisfaction, Support Satisfaction and Financial Satisfaction. WD was the solutions providers’ top choice in the three sub-categories, as well as overall in the SATA hard drives segment.

For the EMEA Channel Academy Award, more than 300 of EMEA's leading volume distributors, retailers and e-tailers voted for their preferred vendor in each category, assessing brands on a variety of factors. WD secured 46 percent of votes by channel partners, versus four other vendors, which split the remaining share.

“Channel organizations around the world have made it loud and clear they trust WD to invest in and commit to their businesses; to offer a clearly differentiated portfolio of purpose-built products, which they can efficiently and profitably sell; and to employ award-winning technologies and the highest quality,” said Matt Rutledge, WD senior vice president of Storage Technologies. “That trust goes both ways. Our channel customers and partners are critical to the strength of our business, marketing our brand and bringing new technologies and products to end customers.”

WD’s channel investments begin with its listening to customers. The partnership has helped WD identify market opportunities created by new or growing storage applications and design product families that solve technical challenges unique to each application. Resellers and integrators are offered the power of choice with WD product names color coded to match each technical purpose. WD ® was first developed for environments demanding low power consumption. Later, WD Black® drives were crafted for high performance storage, WD Red® drives developed for network storage and recently announced WD Purple™ drives launched for the increasingly digital nature of the video surveillance industry. WD also offers building blocks for datacenter applications with WD Xe® for high-performance applications, WD Re™ for high-availability deployments and WD Se™ scale-out architectures.

The company tailors its customer service to channel businesses and offers a wealth of benefits with its myWD™ partner program to help them prosper. myWD is a points-based reward program, offering marketing tools, training, product evaluations and special promotions.

About WD
WD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. These drives are deployed by OEMs and integrators in desktop and mobile computers, enterprise computing systems, embedded systems and consumer electronics applications, as well as by the company in providing its own storage products. WD’s leading storage devices and systems, networking products, media players and software solutions empower people around the world to easily save, store, protect, share and experience their content on multiple devices. WD was established in 1970 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.wd.com.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), Irvine, Calif., is a global provider of products and services that empower people to create, manage, experience and preserve digital content. Its companies design and manufacture storage devices, networking equipment and home entertainment products under the WD, HGST and G-Technology brands. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

Western Digital, WD, the WD logo are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Other marks may be mentioned herein that belong to other companies.